JOY!

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Easter Sunday, April 8th 2007

Readings: Phillipians 2: 1-8; Galatians 3: 25 - 4: 7


I think one of the most challenging things about leading an intergenerational service like this, especially at a time like Easter, is figuring out how to craft a message which expresses the subtlety of what I have to say about the subject in a way that is simple enough that the kids can appreciate it too. One solution obviously is simply to keep it short. But it also helps, I think, to try to use familiar stories and metaphors to communicate what one wants to say -- which can sometimes lead to other problems down the road, when the more analytical engineering-types start looking for some sort of logical consistency in a story that was never really logical to begin with.

And this, of course, is the whole problem of Easter in an eggshell. The Fundamentalist Christians want us to believe that the “miracle” of Easter is that a dead body -- which is to say, Jesus’s dead body -- came to life again (or at the very least, turned up missing from its tomb a few days after everyone thought it was safely buried), and then afterwards a few people even claimed that it talked with them. But when I first heard this story as a kid myself, many years ago now, my first reaction was “So What?” I didn’t really know anything about what it meant to be dead in the first place, so the idea that somebody might be “resurrected” from the dead didn’t really impress me that much either. And since I had to take somebody else’s word for it anyway, and couldn’t actually witness it myself with my own two eyes, the whole story didn’t really mean much more to me than any of the other fantastic fairy tales that grown-ups told me when they were trying to pull my leg, or keep me quiet and entertained while they talked among themselves about more important things.

And then, as I got a little older (and a little more theologically sophisticated), I came to the conclusion (all by myself, although I was attending a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School at the time) that the whole story of Easter was pretty much just a red herring anyway. Because it seemed perfectly obvious to me that if the religion TAUGHT by Jesus was any good in the first place, it wouldn’t really matter whether or not he rose from the dead afterwards; while if it WASN’T any good, a little trick like rising from the dead wasn’t going to make it any better. So I decided that I would just focus in on trying to understand what Jesus himself had to say about the things that were interesting to me, and ignore all the other things that other people had to say about him.

But then, as I got even older, and started to read things like Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, I started to think about all these things again in a whole NEW light. And this is the part where I want to tell a little story about something that actually happened to me just this past Friday night. Friday night I went with a friend over to Littleton to hear Fred Small perform at the Firehouse Coffeehouse. I know this may seem a little hard to believe, but I’d never actually heard Fred perform before; I’ve only known him as another Unitarian minister, so I was really kind of anxious to see this whole other part of his life which, for most people, is the part of his life they know him best for.

And Fred was very impressive (just like I’d expected), and I had a really good time (as did everyone else, except maybe the guy who had to leave early because the police were about to tow is car); but the one thing that really impressed me was the way how Fred, at certain key parts of the show, got us to all stand up and hold hands and sing along, just like we sometimes do here in church. Because (as he pointed out), the entire purpose of his music isn’t just for him to be standing up there on stage singing to us. It’s about all of us singing and moving and harmonizing together, and experiencing the Joy, the Ecstasy, of being part of one body singing with one voice.

You know, that word “ecstatic” means literally “to stand outside oneself.” It’s the exact same root (with jsut a different prefix), as the word “anastasis” -- to “stand again,” which we have borrowed into English in its Latin form “resurrection.” The two ideas are intimately related to one another, but it’s hard to see the connection until you stop thinking about resurrection as having something to do with dead bodies getting up and walking around again, and start thinking about the concept in a more sophisticated way.

A couple of weeks ago now, I preached a sermon about Basketball, in which I talked about the experience of playing together as part of a team, and being “in the zone,” where everything just “clicks” and the boundary between being and doing slips away. And afterwards, one of our choir members came up and told me that’s exactly how she feels when she’s singing along with everyone else in the choir, which of course made perfect sense to me. And when you put music and movement together, what you get is Dance, which brings me to this remarkable book by Barbara Ehrenreich I’ve been reading this past week: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

In this book, Ehrenreich writes about the importance of ecstatic experience in the formation of human community, and especially the difference between Festival and Spectacle. Spectacle is an experience of passive observation (perhaps as part of a mass audience) of something so astonishing that it overwhelms our individuality, yet still ultimately leaves us feeling small and isolated, and alone; while a Festival in many ways is just the opposite: a shared celebration in which we actively participate, and which draws us out of ourselves in an ecstatic experience of human interaction, connection and community.

Let me just read to you a few brief passages from the book:

Anthropologists tend to agree that the evolutionary function of the dance was to enable -- or encourage -- humans to live in groups larger than small bands of closely related individuals. The advantage of larger group size is presumed to be the same as it is for those primates who still live in the wild: Larger groups are better able to defend themselves against predators. Unlike most animals -- antelopes, for example -- primates are capable of mounting a group defense, mobbing the intruding predator, threatening it with branches, or at least attempting to scare it off by making an infernal racket. In the case of early humans, the danger may have come not only from predatory animals like the big cats but from other now-extinct hominids or even from fellow Homo sapiens bent on raiding. And of course, in the human case, the forms of defense would have included fire, rocks, and sharpened sticks. But the first line of defense was to come together as a group....

Like primates in the wild today, early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively -- banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches. In our own time, for example, hikers are often advised to try to repel bears they encounter in the wild with the same sorts of behavior, with the arm and stick waving being recommended as a way of exaggerating the humans’ height. At some point, early humans or hominids may have learned to synchronize their stampings and stick-wavings in the face of a predator, and the core of my speculation is that the predator might be tricked by this synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced -- not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans -- but a single, very large animal. When sticks are being brandished and feet stamped in unison, probably accompanied by synchronized chanting or shouting, it would be easy for an animal observer to conclude that only a single mind, or at least a single nervous system, is at work. Better, from the predator’s point of view, to wait to catch a human alone than to tangle with what appears to be a twenty-foot-long, noisy, multilegged beast....

Over time, as...the threat of animal predators declined, the thrill of the human triumph over animals could still be reinvoked as ritual. Through rhythm, people had learned to weld themselves into a single unit of motion meant to project their collective strength and terrify the animals they hunted or that hunted them. Taken individually, humans are fragile, vulnerable, clawless creatures. But banded together through rhythm and enlarged through the artifice of masks and sticks, the group can feel -- and perhaps appear -- to be as formidable as any nonhuman beast. When we speak of transcendent experience in terms of “feeling part of something larger than ourselves,” it may be this ancient, many-headed pseudocreature that we unconsciously invoke....

Which brings me to the metaphor of the risen body of Christ, and Paul’s remarkable assertion in Galatians that we are all children of God, and that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Once again, the literalists literally want to turn this passage upside-down, suggesting that what it means is that somehow Christians are better than everyone else, because they are the heirs to God’s kingdom while everyone else is excluded. But Paul is saying that the spirit of Jesus has shown us just the opposite: that their is no distinction or hierarchy in God’s Kingdom, and that we are all heirs to the promise, we’ve all been invited to dance at the party.

Once again, Ehrenreich describes it this way:

Hierarchy, by its nature, establishes boundaries between people -- who can go where, who can approach whom, who is welcome and who is not. Festivity breaks the boundaries down....While hierarchy is about exclusion, festivity generates inclusiveness. The music invites everyone to the dance; shared food briefly undermines the privilege of class. As for masks: They may serve symbolic, ritual functions, but, to the extent that they conceal identity, they also dissolve the difference between stranger and neighbor, making the neighbor temporarily strange and the stranger no more foreign than anyone else. No source of human difference or identity is immune to the carnival challenge; cross-dressers defy gender just as those who costume as priests and kings mock power and rank. At the height of the festivity, we step out of our assigned roles and statuses -- of gender, ethnicity, tribe, and rank -- and into a brief utopia defined by egalitarianism, creativity, and mutual love. This is how danced rituals and festivities served to bind prehistoric groups, and this is what still beckons us today.

The great miracle of Easter is that what we thought was a tragedy turns out to be a party, and that the loss of a single individual in no way means the end of the community, or its ability to move together in rhythm, singing in harmony and speaking as with one voice. The teacher is dead, but the teachings live on, embodied in whoever is willing to stand outside of themselves, and live the life of a child of God.

Like the festival of Passover, by which it was inspired, during which Jews commemorate the escape of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt, and the forty YEARS they spent wandering in the Wilderness of Sinai, until Moses and all of that original generation had passed away, and the children of Israel had become one people, prepared to enter the land of Milk and Honey they had been promised by the God of Abraham, the story of Easter begins on Ash Wednesday, and the forty days of fasting and preparation of Lent.

It continues on Palm Sunday, and the joyous entry into Jerusalem -- a parade of celebration and expectation, which takes an unexpected turn when Jesus is betrayed and arrested on the eve of the Sabbath, and brutally executed by the Romans like a common criminal on a hill outside the city.

But then comes the miracle, which even today, almost 2000 years later, still brings us together in a place like this on Easter Sunday -- to sing, to celebrate, to give thanks for one another, this community of “Neighbours and Fellow Cretures,” this body of the faithful, who know in our hearts that we are all brothers and sisters to one another, and heirs to the promises that the God of Abraham has made to all Her People....